You may be wondering how to offer varied meals to your baby, when all you eat yourself is the leftover pizza from last night’s takeaway. Let’s face it, it’s not always easy to find inspiration to vary the meals of little ones or find the time to prepare healthy meals when you are exhausted at the end of the day. This is where batch cooking comes to the rescue.
What is Batch Cooking?
To put it simply, batch cooking is where you cook a lot of food in one go and then store it.
How do I batch cook when weaning?
We believe that batch cooking is not necessarily about cooking a load of meals at once. What we do think, is that when you are making freezer friendly meals, whether for the family or for baby, that you make more than needed so that you can freeze it.
If you get into the habit of doing this, then your freezer will soon be full of a variety of different meals ready when needed.
It’s also great if baby is spending the day with family as you have something healthy already prepared to send with them.
Remember to get yourself a range of containers for storing your batch cooking. Béaba Multiportions have 6 compartments and can go in the fridge, freezer, microwave and oven. With Béaba Glass Storage Jars you can accurately measure portion size and can defrost and reheat baby’s meal in your Babycook®. And don’t forget to label what you freeze!
What foods should I batch cook?
When you first start weaning baby, you are more than likely puréeing one ingredient e.g. apple, pear, carrot. If you freeze some of each, you will soon have enough to mix and match your frozen purées when baby is ready for something more adventurous like avocado and peach or pumpkin and banana. This will also help baby expand their tastes and get them used to different flavour combinations.
Once you and baby are getting the hang of basic purées, then you can start to try meals like spag bol, fish curry, veggie risotto or chicken soup. All of which can be made into purées for baby and also enjoyed by the whole family.
Even if you are using baby lead weaning, you can still freeze healthy muffins (both sweet & savoury), bites, patties and fish cakes.
Most importantly, experiment and have fun!